Time and Memory
by The Sound Of Silver
Summary: (Retelling of the FFXIII-2 story. SLight.) Cursed with the fate of a Seeress, Serah disappears from the timeline, leaving behind ghosts and whispers. Catching onto her trail, Lightning and Snow realize that something has gone missing from their lives, and they must save her. Eight crystals, a Guardian and the Goddess are against them. Failure is not an option. And neither is love.
1. Prologue

A/N: Hello der! I see you, stalking the just in to find a new story to read. Well here you are, hehe.

This story will hopefully do it for ya! As fair warning, this will contain a lot of annoying Snow/Lightning romantic tension, as they are the main pairing, but it's not going to be overt. Meaning lots of sllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwww building. That's just how these stories work, considering that Snow is still technically engaged to Serah. Wellllllllllllll, _technically_. :3 don't think to hard about it. All in good time. I hope that even if you don't like the pairing, you'll give this story a shot! It's not all SLight fluff! And that's not a spoiler. You're smart enough to infer from the pairing brackets that this will be SLight related.

 _#Shipping this until I die._

Well. Shall we start?

* * *

 _Prologue: Awaken._

She was sleeping.

She was awake.

Tortured. Comfortable. Freezing. Burning. Frozen in one moment. Seeing all in the next.

Her eyes burned with the visions, but even when she closed her eyes, they forced themselves into her. Forced her to see it all. No escape: open or closed.

She waited for the painful revelations to pass. They refused her desires just like they refused her before, when she didn't want to see them.

Finally, after witnessing countless timelines...

The light was blinding her. So bright, so painful. She shut her eyes again, praying for some kind of relief. The darkness behind her lids as red as the light poured down. It hurt. It hurt to look. Maybe if she opened her eyes, then she would adjust to the brilliant invasion. Slowly, she opened them, hoping for salvation.

It came to her.

The light dimmed. A soft hand brushed her left eye. It was frigid, forcing her to jolt back.

She looked up, trying to find it. A woman, who looked only as old as her thirties but _felt_ archaic, smiled softly down at her. Her eye (Only one? Where was the other?) held compassion and peaceful sadness.

And then all thoughts of salvation were gone as the woman removed the girl's eye with her fingers. And the girl couldn't fight. She _never could._

She was Serah Farron. The weak side of her family equation. She couldn't fight because _she never had to_. Her sister, Eclair, had always done it for her. And when Eclair, now donning the name Lightning, was too busy to protect her every moment of the day, she found Snow to fill in the gaps.

She was a horrendous person. A weak creature. The worst kind of parasite. A disgusting waste.

This was her punishment for being so weak and dooming so many to death so long ago... But in terms of time, she had no clear idea.

Yes, she deserved this. She deserved much worse than being blind, but this would do.

"This is your duty. Continue the cycle."

And the light was gone. She was free. But at the same time chained.

Serah stared at her knees, weak. She was somewhere where the grasses tickled her hands. The air smelled drastically different, and crystal fragments floated in the air before landing as iridescent snowflakes. Soft dirt was indented by her knees, the call of the wild unmistakable.

A boy, frozen in a moment in time as she had once been, was slowly freeing himself from his glimmering prison. "Dajh." The name came to her somehow. Odd, she never knew a Dajh in her life.

She felt a strange pull in two directions; the pull of two fates was unmistakable even for a fool such as herself. She stood, walking slowly, trembling as she did. The call of one fate, one of repentance, was too strong to resist.

She could see pink hair in the distance she had left behind.

Serah turned and continued on her prior chosen path.

She would be selfish and weak no longer.


	2. To The Beginning of Truth

_Chapter One: To The Beginning of Truth._

Flowers the color of dying sunlight swayed in the breeze, the sky dotted with soft white clouds. The sun was bright, but warm and unobtrusive. It lightly brushed her skin, a wonderful addition to the ambiance.

Quiet. So quiet. Blood still on a lake.

Blood?

The crimson droplet fell from the sky and hit a flower, staining the blush pink.

Another.

Another.

Flowers. Everywhere. Stained with blood

It poured onto her face in hot, sticky, metallic rain. The clouds were as innocent as ever, only now maliciously raining human essence.

She panicked, fear overtaking the peace she once had. No, this wasn't the way it was supposed to be. This wasn't right!

The moment she thought this, she was awake, no longer in a satanic rendition of a field, but on a cave floor next to the dying embers of last night's fire. Sweat coated her skin and soaked her clothing in all of her creases, meaning she would be damp in the wrong places for the rest of the day. Splendid.

Panting heavily, she looked to her side with her chest heaving. To the right, a bedroll lay abandoned, its occupant missing. That made her pause. Where was he...? He couldn't be in any danger, could he?

The slender woman frowned. He could always find trouble if she wasn't there to pull his head, and ego, out of his ass.

Even though she was feeling like hell itself, she still stood up and prepared to find him.

A man, as tall and broad as she was elegantly proportioned, dwarfed the entrance to the camp as he came in, his lengthy blond hair tied behind his head with a cheap band that looked ready to break. He looked at her in surprise, as if waking in the wee hours of morning was new for her. "Sorry," he apologized for some reason. "I thought I was being quiet."

She shook her head and rubbed the sleeplessness out of her eyes. "I just woke up right before you got back." She regarded him curiously. "Where did you go?"

He made an uncomfortable face and massaged the back of his neck with his hand, a habit he had when he was embarrassed. Before he could speak, she connected the dots and raised a hand. "You know what?" She said, moving past him. "Forget I asked. Im going to watch from the right, okay? Get some sleep, Snow." She grabbed her boots, which were situated against the smooth wall near the entrance.

Snow Villiers watched her leave, wondering how Lightning Farron was going to do that when she was running on two hours of pseudo rest.

The Time Gate—more commonly known as just a Gate—stood before them, an elegant construct of fragmented spacetime and crystal. Around it, Chaos danced into the air before warping back inside. A sphere of light glowed from deep inside, images of time flashing by far too fast to comprehend.

It was their ticket out of here. But it was locked away until the proper key, an item of seemingly random origin known as an Artifact, was reunited with it.

"Where do you think it is?" Snow asked.

"It's a red lake flower." Lightning said, flipping her hair over her shoulder. "So we need to look for a source of water."

Snow nodded, knowing better than to question her...abilities when it had saved their asses more than once.

That didn't mean he was okay with them. Something in him screamed "it's fucking sinister!" whenever she spoke of dreams of Artifacts. Or could discover Gates without even trying. Or the way these magical—and ultimately dangerous—items seemed drawn to her and vice versa. Occasionally it happened to him, but to a lesser extent and far less vivid.

"Snow." She demanded from a number of yards away, her knees swallowed by the grass. "Come on. There's water this way." She pointed to south of their current position for a seconds before dropping her hand and turning her back to walk again.

He chuckled once, shaking his head. No matter what happened, she was still the boss.

"Villiers," she spoke when he had caught up.

"Yeah?"

She ran a hand through her hair and adjusted her pack. "..." Lightning was never good with words that expressed emotion or thoughts. "...Serah's okay, wherever she's at, you know that, right? So don't be upset."

Snow paused in his tracks. So, she did know where he went last night. But then again, he wasn't exactly discreet.

He wasn't sure whether to be upset at the lack of privacy, the fact that she knew him so well or the fact of...

Heh...

Shit, he was still so angry. After what he had seen in Oerba, it was hard not to feel as if he wanted to strangle that bastard who took Serah away.

"I'm fine, Lightning. Thanks for it anyways." He shrugged past her, avoiding her judging gaze. "It's a flower, right? If I need you, I'll call for your help."

Lightning watched him leave, knowing that she was the worst person in the world to speak of things like this, especially about the sister who abandoned them both.

Far above them, two figures watched from the hillside. The man was well-built for his young age, his eyes a brilliant shade of azure and his soft brunette hair cut in a messingly endearing way. His young face told tales reserved for men twice his age, tales of death, of loss, of sadness and pain.

The woman was petite, but the air of strength was clear around her. Her eyes were also blue, but in a lighter, less intense shade. Her skin bore no physical scars, but her countenance spoke the same volumes his did. Pink hair tied in a low ponytail cascaded over her bare shoulder, closely resembling the hair of the woman below their vantage point.

"They've already found the first one." Serah turned to the sound of Noel's voice. "They're determined."

A sigh escaped her. "I should've known. They're both so stubborn. They think they can change fate."

Noel studied her through the corner of his eye. He was gauging her every reaction to the sight before her. He had no attachment to these people—they were just a snag in the Goddess' plans—but Serah was different story. The man farther away was her fiancé. The woman, her sister.

Her eyes held sadness, great weights of it, but...

"Are you okay?"

Her eyes fell. "I don't know. It's my...family. But, I—"

"Do you want to go with them?"

"No." She shook her head with conviction. "I'm doing the right thing." She smiled at him.

Noel watched her for a few seconds more before yawning and turning around. "Come on, we need to tell Caius. Maybe he can convince them to stop."

"I doubt it. I told you they're stubborn."

"Let's hope for their sakes, they aren't too stubborn." Noel motioned for her to follow him.

Serah took one last longing gaze at the two. Did her heart ache to be with them? Yes. Always. She wanted to be home, with them, if she could.

But that simply wasn't her life, her existence, anymore.

'Strong. Not selfish.' Serah thought as she turned away.

~•~

AN: Well, howdy do! Here's the first chapter. Like I said before, it's a lot of plot and stuff I have to put together, so please excuse any mistakes I may make, or the long ass waits between chapters. If you see any plot holes, feel free to tell me and I'll see if I can fill them :D. Hopefully the next one will be much, much, much longer. And I'd like to say thanks for all the reviews and follows I've gotten so far! Thank you all so much! Also, this format is a bit different because I'm using my iPod to write and upload this, so it's a pain in the Valhalla to try and work with (bolds/italics/horizontal lines). X~X sorry! When I get to a computer, I'll be sure to do some editing.


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